1- At the start of the game, try to survive the first round with pistol and the barracks alone as it is possible and the longer you can hold on to your money, the better prepared you will be for later waves.

2- Alternatively, on wave one (if you have upgrades) place down two mines at the outer edge of the map. They are hard to defend at first but when more enemies start to come you will need your active mines close to your main base (especially at wave 20+) Buy yourself a plasma rifle, you should be able to afford this on wave one if you have it unlocked.

3- on wave one (without upgrades) if your not so high in levels then you need to gain experience before doing anything fancy, go ahead and put your barracks in the middle of the highest concentration of minerals, buy a couple of mines and place them behind your barracks, on the opposite side from where the waves will come from. After that, cover your base in 2-3 plasma guns.

4- USEFUL UPGRADES LIST (IN ORDER and subject to change)
1: upgrade basic mine to cost no power (alternatively get light spotter on starter gun to help with your turrets)
2: upgrade plasma guns
3: laser towers shoot in dark ability
4: upgrade plasma rifle to eliminate reload time and boost its damage
5: upgraded advanced mines to not use any power
6: upgrade laser towers to not use any power
7: finish upgrading all turrets to not use power and the ability to shoot at night

5- Dont dismiss guns that do little damage, a lot of them can be upgraded to create status inducing effects!

6- when placing turrets be mindful of how you position them, guns need line of sight to fire!!

7- if you place a turret inside a 28 block you will only have one line of sight to shoot from, DONT DO THIS!
(although in certain situations where you need to hold a choke point it can actually work wonders)

Here is a picture of how to get maximum firing arc with a simple base design:

8- once you get the plasma rifle upgraded you can solo up to wave 3/4 easy, so do this and put down as many basic and advances mines as possible. Then when you get into difficulty make either one tower on your barracks, or four towers around your barracks for maximum LOS then put down as many lasers as you can afford. If you have the ability where they can shoot in the dark you should be good for another few waves until you need to upgrade.

Be careful not to accidentally overwrite your farm save, it helps to have two or three copies just in case.

10- EXP doubler is a good way to support forsaken however as the levels are limitless and as far as I am currently aware, once you have high enough levels to unlock all the turrets the only advantage to higher levels is an increased health Pool. This isn't to say a bad thing though, as later levels will enable you to don some armour and run around with an upgraded hammer like Chuck Norris and Rambo. Just be careful that you can still get that health back at some point. Regeneration is in some ways better than maximum!

11- basic lights are good but they can create line of sight problems for your ranged defences! As soon as you unlock the spotter place a few towers noting down their optimal range. 3-4 placed around your base should be good enough for the first night for maximum circumference. At a certain point you won't need any lights at all with the correct block upgrades though.

12- if your still early on in the upgrade scene, try making a laser tower like this. It's simple to build and is just a big pole with guns around it, it will cause problems around level 20 but it's a good start;

13 - There is no undo button, but if you delete items placed in the same build phase you get all your resources back.

Also many blocks can be upgraded to give back 100% resources regardless of what wave or build phase you are on... Which I think is necessary for going into the long achivement category for survival

AND some of my quotes from the main thread which may be of some use;

Tech blocks are used to future proof bases in later waves, up until now I have been building with wood but if you do that and try to replace it further down the line you can kiss your base goodbye in a long game. The roof is made of wood though, so replacing or expanding when it comes to hitting wave 60 is going to be cheap in theory.

For example:

If you manage to get to wave 20 you get attacked from all directions might be good to keep in mind for future planning

Handintoasters tips:

Mineral deposits are those tiny cubes on the ground. You need to put mineshafts on top of them. I believe mineshafts are the only way to get minerals while playing. (Just for anyone wondering)

Rare minerals let you upgrade items in the craft menu on the home screen of the game. You get different rare minerals on different maps.

DEVELOPER TIPS (foursaken)

Nice base! And YES, you are correct... downward and sideways facing turrets are an absolute must to cover yourself at closer ranges. That of course is the tradeoff... downward facing allows for close range fire support, and top mounted guns allow for long ranged fire support...

Depends really, for long survival games I'd almost always go in the middle to get maximum viewing distance and allow you ample time post wave 20 to find the shadow goblocks, otherwise if your base is at a corner they could hop over and be inside in seconds.

Unless of course you are on maps where you can use proper cliffs to your advantage in a particular area, so the mobs have to take extra time climbing down and back up again. Cliffs on three sides of the barracks could be ideal in the proper situation, but I have yet to find that perfect cliff that makes me move away from dead center map. Of course I am coming from long range perspective, if you do put a base in a corner then I guess you could take full advantage of close range weapons like flamethrowers to toast mobs early as they appear before they become a big threat.

Another reason for going in the middle is that by the time you start having long games, the terrain gets demolished eventually.

For a quick match id say it really depends on the terrain more so than survival but it really depends... If you want the one hour achivement on that you need to have simillar tactical awareness like in survival.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mookmonster

retrospect though, would it be better to use lasers for the slow affect? range is really far, gonna get a lot of bang for the slow buck, whereas mortors start with only 18 range.

I'd say it depends almost entirely on the map, play-style and barracks location.

In mountains if your barracks is surrounded on three sides or something similar mortars mean that you can have less guns exposed to enemy fire, so on a good mountain map the slow on those is probably better.

However, on a flat map where mountains are almost a non-consideration, unless you make some fancy walling system slow would likely be better on other guns like the lasers because your turrets are mostly all going to be exposed any way. That's not saying a fancy walling system shouldn't be used because thats a great thing to do also.

For my mountain map I only have mortars for a very specific job but they do that extremely well, mainly because they are protecting the blind side of my mountain from mobs that climb. That means that if my infi-range guns like satellites (and MIRV in most respects) are busy shooting half way across the map then the mortars will buy enough time for them to destroy said climbers (or disrupt goblocks from trying to get cheap shots on my base).

Explosives Spotter Tip!

I recommend buying the spotter equipment and getting the identification mod which will show a icon to indicate the enemy(below shows a skull for the shadow enemies) so you can pick out the important threats.

Weapon Specific Advice / Combinations

COMING SOON!

Key Turrets

This section is not going to tell you exactly what to place and when, but will talk about key situational uses and recommended upgrades for turrets, it will eventually be sorted into alphabetical order and possibly moved to another section in this thread for inclusion of pictures.

MACHINE GUN:
This gun isn't the greatest gun of them all to say the least but it can easily be an underrated weapon. One of its key uses can be within mountainous terrain early-game when you need to defend remote mines but do not have the speed to travel through all areas of the map. To use these best in that situation, place your mines inside a walled off area then place 3x(3x3) blocks nearby with one extra block in the middle top (just an example!), then place an MG gun on those top blocks and you should be defendable for the first few waves without babysitting the area, even in the late game this can make for an excellent distraction! This will work equally as well on more flatter maps.

LASER
There are two possible key uses for this turret.
Flat hilly worlds: In worlds that tend to be flat you may want to have a couple of slow upgrades on this laser as their range can reach across the map, even most of the time if in a corner! They are not a STAB weapon but are a perfect DPS weapon that will eventually tag the strongest units and wear them down, which is a perfect reason for wanting them to slow down units. It is recommended to have 3-4 in each corner of your base for this purpose (numbers may vary)! On mountainous maps this may not be so good an idea compared to other guns much better suited for slowing units down.

Mountains: On these maps you will want to tot almost pure damage on your lasers if you chose to have any, the best situation for these is at the back of a pass or ravine where they have the greatest amount of time to wear down an enemy unit. On these maps you will typically want your lasers to be either extremely low for the passes or the other extreme, as high as possible to cover units moving over the mountain peaks.

Heavy Plasma
Without upgrading heavy plasma just stick to the regular plasma guns and mass those instead. However, if you get the chance upgrade heavy plasma guns rate of fire and AOE radius and they become a good mass-stun turret for all round situations. Don't place too many of these though because their cost is rather large. 4 per map is usually more than good enough. On a flat map you will want one on each corner of your base, while on a mountainous map their best use is located on the side of a block slightly raised from base level to cover specific base entrances that mobs most commonly path through. Alternatively you could swap out the stun for damage but there are personal guns such as your own hand held Heavy Plasma which will do that just as well.

Mortar
WARNING: These turrets are very situational! If you understand that though and spot where they can be used your life will be made much easier. I would recommend using a few of these in mountainous maps, be sure to upgrade their rate of fire x3 and slow mod x5. Typically this will only work if your barracks is situated inside a mountain pass but these can stop units from moving over the top of the mountain peaks closest to your barracks to give enough time for the heavy hitting weapons such as MIRV and O.L to focus on. A picture can explain this more than words so that will be provided soon!

MIRV
These missiles are easily overlooked because of their very high money cost, they also don't have the greatest damage in the world (unlessupgraded) but their main advantage on both mountain and flat maps is their ability to interrupt mass groups of enemies from shooting. For this reason they are the perfect counter to those pesky Goblocks that shoot lasers but you will want 2-3 of them in a map to be very effective. My recommended mods for these are AOEmodx2 damageMODx1 DetectorMODx1 PowerSourcex1 and finally the MOST important upgrade being ROFmodx5

Freeze Gun
one of the easiest weapons to overlook but if you have a particular section in a mountainous map that is travelled frequently by mobs one or two of these can do wonders in slowing them down. You will have to be very careful about the positioning as they are very easy to take down but work wonders on the sides of blocks raised up from the ground.

Orbital Laser
Cheap and Effective, the maximum in any game is 10 and that is what you should always aim for, as early in a game as possible! Without these a game is much harder than it should be!

On the flat maps it's a good idea to get the plasma rifle early and completely clear all the blocks under and around the barracks as soon as you can before you properly start setting up your fort.

This will be very beneficial in the long run because you no longer have to worry about accidently shooting them with plasma and letting enemies through or just getting caught by explosions so they are now forced to attack your blocks.

1) Always place your turrets up high. It gives them a better range and you don't have a very big risk that the enemies will destroy them. Make sure you also get a power block in the center of all the turrets to power as many as possible.

2) Defend mines. Mines are usually in places easy to reach for the enemies, so it wouldn't hurt to put some blocks around them or a turret for extra defense.

3) On the early stages, let your turrets do the work. Don't work on making your base look good, get to high ground, build turrets (in a high place, I find in trees also works good) and let them do most of the work. If you go against a wave with your gun, make sure you've got decent health. You could get mobbed by the enemies.

4) Upgrade your barracks when possible. You can do this by hitting the barracks with select. It costs $100 and 75 'm', but I've found it's worth it.

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